Time Is Noon (45 page)

“My mother and father died,” said David, “so they couldn’t come with us.” His voice was sudden and clear out of the darkness.

In the evening she sat listening to John Stuart. She had brought the children home with her and bathed them and fed them. It had been her sacrament, the bathing of their childish flesh, the giving of the bread and milk. She had washed and comforted the wailing baby and soothed her chafed limbs. She had heated the creamy milk and fed it to her and watched her small worn face settle into sleep. Across from her, David sat watching. “My Uncle John doesn’t know how to make Mary stop crying.”

“Uncles don’t, so well,” she said. She looked at him, waiting, ready for worship of him. But she must not hurry him. His mind was full of images she did not know. She must wait until he showed himself.

“Are we going to live here?”

“Yes, David.”

“There’s no wall.”

“No wall at all. You can run as far as you like. Only come home to me at night.”

He sighed deeply and freely. “I want to go to bed.”

“Yes, your bed is all ready, a new bed specially for you.”

“I can bathe myself. I haven’t had my amah bathe me for a long time now.”

“You shall do everything for yourself.”

He looked up from his bowl of bread and milk. “I know milk runs from a cow. Once my father told me that. But I haven’t seen it.”

“This ran fresh today for you and Mary and Paul.”

He lay clean and fed between the sheets made fragrant by the sun, waiting for John Stuart. “I’d rather not go to sleep without saying my prayers to my Uncle John.”

She was glad she had said to John Stuart, “You’d better come down the first evening.” She heard his footsteps soon.

“David’s waiting,” she said. They went upstairs together. But he had not been able to wait after all. He was asleep, lying on his side, his thin little hand under his cheek. The man hesitated. “I won’t wake him to say his prayers tonight.”

“No,” she said quietly. “Sleep will do more for him, after all.”

Downstairs she and John Stuart sat by the fireplace and she lit the logs. He sat as though he were exhausted, making no move to help her. When the fire was blazing he looked about the small quiet room and brought his eyes to her as she sat waiting for him to speak.

“You don’t know what this means,” he said. “The quiet—the stillness about the house. I keep listening.”

“For what?” she asked. That was the look on his face, the look of listening.

“For the cries of people,” he answered. “For strange separate cries—screams which no one goes to still, a child crying so that I know it’s in pain, people quarreling, the drone of priests, the angry mob. The sea dashing against the ship woke me so often in the night. It was like that roaring. When the bandits burst the city gates it was like that—a swelling roar—I saw them hew Rob down. He called out something to me. I couldn’t hear it, in the noise. But I couldn’t have gone to him. I was bound to a bamboo and they were carrying me away.”

She stared at him, trying to see what he was telling her. He was talking in a quiet remote voice, gazing into the fire.

“But how did you escape?”

“I had a friend among them,” he answered, “a man who had been in my hospital. He tied me himself, loosely, and whispered to me not to resist. So I let him tie me. They burned my hospital. I have to begin again from the bottom. Nothing’s left. They tore everything to pieces.”

She thought suddenly of the peach-colored satin nightgown she had given Rose. In its way it had been precious to her—a small delicate something that was precious. She had never had another so pretty. There had been no one to give her such things, and she could not afford them. But the crowd had torn it and thrown it away. It was wasted after all.

“You’re not going back!” she said.

He was holding his hands to the fire and around the narrow wrists where his cuffs had slipped up she saw deep scarified marks, still purple, where ropes had ground away the flesh.

“Yes, I’m going back—the people there need a hospital. There’s no hospital in a thousand miles.” He smiled a little. “Maybe that’s why I go back, because I seem important there. Here I’d be one of hundreds—a country doctor, maybe. There I’m specialist, surgeon and everything. It’s become a mania with me to save lives. I don’t know what for—”

“See what they did!” she whispered.

“It’s a curious thing,” he said slowly, almost faintly, “the fellow who saved me talked almost like a Christian. Do you know, he made me think of Rob. He was so young and so anxious to do good—you know, serve the common people. The odd thing was he thought they were right to kill. He had it all worked out. He wasn’t crazy at all. He was good in his way. He thought he was doing his duty. He used to talk about it in the hospital. And it was through him that I found the children afterwards. The amah had taken them to her home in the village. They weren’t hurt—they were there several days before I could get them out. She dressed them up like the village children. I don’t believe David realizes much. She covered his face when—when they took his mother—and she got him right away.”

She could not speak.

“Yes, I must go back,” he said, sighing.

But for the moment they sat sheltered in this still small house in the center of the wild and noisy world. She asked him no more. When he rose to go she said quietly over their handclasp, “You will come again sometime? This is more than passing?”

But he put his hand to his forehead in a gesture she remembered from her father.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t tell—I never know—” He put her hand down. “Wait, I remember I had something to give you.” He fumbled in his pocket and brought out a small torn book bound between stiff black cardboard covers. “They found this. It was your sister’s diary.”

He went away, and she did not see him again.

But after all, she thought, sitting alone by the fire, holding the little book, Rose would have chosen to die in martyrdom. Death must have come for her large and shining and swift. That would be Rose, dying purely for Christ’s sake, dying with a lift of angel wings. She opened the book. Rose’s hands had written here. This was the story of her life in that strange far country. She began to read eagerly, tenderly, half-shyly. There would be things here which Rose had not meant anyone to see, intimate, secret things which Rose would never tell.

But over and over it was the same thing—“We must thank God today for—” “We must endure hardship as brave soldiers of Christ.” There was really nothing there at all, nothing about Rose.

She was ashamed to be so happy. But she could not keep from happiness. It was the bodily happiness of one who, after long illness, deprived of sleep and food, of the pleasure of the power to walk and move, feels sleep fall upon him gratefully again, knows afresh the taste of fruit and meat and bread, and feels his limbs once again his own, to come and go. She spent her days in simplest joy of cooking and mending and making clean for these three who were hers. She was aghast when she suddenly thought, watching David run across a meadow in the wind, “It is better that Rose died.” But he was a flying ecstasy in the wind and falling leaves. He ran everywhere. He could not walk. In the ceaseless wonder of all there was to be seen, he ran all day. She let him go free knowing he was born to be free and so must be free. She waited for him at night to give him food and rest. She sat beside him as he ate, waiting for him to speak, watching his vivid narrow face move and change with his thinking.

“In the woods I saw a kind of animal. It had a tail straight up its back.”

“That was a squirrel.”

“It held a nut like a monkey does. There aren’t monkeys in these woods. I’ve seen monkeys.”

“Here there are only monkeys in a zoo.”

“I haven’t seen a zoo. But I will. I’ll see everything. Am I going to school?”

“You shall go to school in the village where your mother and your Uncle Francis and I went to school when we were little.”

“I want to see the boys here. I hope they, aren’t cowards. They were cowards there—in the place I came from. They’d yell names at me in the street because I was a foreigner, and when I went after them they ran and hid.” He scowled, remembering. “Some day when I’m big I’m going to lead an army against them. I’m going to fight them with an army and guns. I hate cowards. I used to fill my pockets with stones and hunt them, but I couldn’t find them. There were so many little winding streets and courts. And they’d run into the women’s courts and hide. They’d hide among the women!” He looked at her to share his disgust.

His mind was full of memories she did not know. She must wait for them to fade, she must make other memories for him. “You will find brave boys here, some of them,” she said quietly.

He ate on, pondering over his plate. “My father didn’t want me to fight. He said it was wrong. When I grow up I won’t be a preacher, so’s I can fight.”

“It’s only wrong not to fight fairly,” she said.

“Oh, sure—not to fight fair, that’s wrong.” he agreed heartily. He rose, having eaten mightily. He laughed, quickly, loudly. “Gee, you remember that first day I came I didn’t know how milk came out of a cow? I thought it ran out!” He laughed, boasting, “I know better now—you have to pull it out! But I didn’t know much about America then. A fellow ought to know about his own country, oughtn’t he?”

“Yes,” she agreed, smiling, adoring him. She wanted to seize his small lean eager body to her, but she would not. He could make it blade-tense against even her, if he were not willing. She must leave him alone. All she had to do was to set food upon the table for him to take, put books near—she must buy books—open the door to the fields and sky. He went stamping upstairs to bed. He was just learning to whistle and she heard the uncertain piping of his whistling in his own room. He was trying to whistle “Oh, say, can you see—” Soon he would shout and she could go to him; not until he called.

But sometimes when he called she saw the look of pondering upon his face, that look of remembering. Yet never once had he spoken of what he remembered. She saw him look like this, pausing before he bit into a piece of cake, or at night lingering before he went to bed. Once in the night when the wind howled he called her and she went to find him, lying tensely wakeful! “I just wanted to ask you something,” he said, his voice carefully casual. “In America, they don’t ever come in a big crowd to kill people, do they?”

She took David’s hand. It was cold and damp. “Would you like to come and sleep with me?” she said.

“Yes,” he whispered.

In her bed she held him quietly, feeling his body relax and grow warm.

“You’re safe here,” she said. About him, about them all, she would build securely the walls of her own house. There were no other walls that could be trusted.

Yet even as she held him in his sleep, she knew that in the morning she must let him go free again. In the morning she must pretend he had not been afraid and that the night had never been.

But the baby Mary she could hold in her arms until she was appeased. Mary had stopped her wailing. She was beginning to grow. She lay content in Joan’s arms, watching her out of dark merry comprehending eyes.

My face will be the first she knows, Joan thought, trembling with joy, gazing back into her eyes. She knew now the mystery of flesh, sweet to the touch and sentient with mind. This child’s flesh was informed with her mind. The mind ran through the veins and muscles and made them flow and spring. This child’s hands were quick and searching, instant to seek and explore, tenacious to cling. To hold her was to hold a springing eager life. She grew within days to be a merry willful gleeful creature, moving, reaching, wanting, laughing soon, stiffening instantly at refusal.

From these two Joan turned to Paul in silence. She had learned to live in David when it was his time, in Mary at her hour. Paul must have his hour, too. But she tended him in quiet. He could struggle to his feet now and walk in a fashion across a little space. But she could not be sure he knew her.

“Joan, Joan!” David’s flying voice rang through the house a score of times a day. Mary laughed aloud to see her come. But Paul smiled at anything, at nothing, his heavy body struggling dully to movement. When she held him now she held him in silence, feeding him carefully, tending him closely. He was hers forever, and yet he would never be wholly hers. Alien earthy ancestors had entered into his making and had withheld him. She had tried to mingle parts forever separate. His very flesh was not all her own. She did not kiss his hands, his feet, as once she had. They were taking on a look of Bart’s hands, Bart’s feet. She put the thought away steadfastly. She held him, crying in her heart, “You are my own child.” But he was not quite her own. She knew now that only love could make an own child.

… “I have no children,” Roger Bair wrote when she told him of her houseful. “My wife is not strong and we have had no children.”

She read the words and put the letter down quickly. He had not told her he was married. He should have told her. She was desolate for the moment, knowing he was not free. She had never thought him otherwise than free by his very being. She remembered him always free, soaring to the sky, as she had seen him the one morning. Everything seemed to be taken from her. She had to make her life out of bits. Then her mother’s sense in her cried out, “And did you ever tell him about yourself?” No, but he had seen her big with child. He had seen her so at first. She wrote him fully then, plainly, “I have left my husband. I want you to know.” She told him everything. When this was done she was at peace again. The pain was over. He was himself, he was alive in her time in the world. It was enough. It was still strength enough to live upon. And that day where the meadow behind the house ran down to a small stream, she found blind gentians. They were bright blue. She had never found them so late before.

In and out of the house Rob’s father came and went, restlessly, hungering for the children, but shy of them because they made him think of Rob and suffer. And he was not in David’s passionate life of school and play, nor in Mary’s life of daily growing. Mary turned away from his painful smile at her to laugh at Joan, because Joan laughed easily. She always made Joan laugh and knew she did.